Moira Cockell trained as a biologist at the University of Edinburgh and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, England. She obtained a Ph.D in 1990 for studies carried out jointly in Lausanne’s Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) and the LMB. Since then she has co-authored numerous research articles and reviews and contributed to the understanding of several fundamental cellular regulatory mechanisms. For the last two years she has been collaborating with basic scientists, bioinformaticians and clinicians to integrate knowledge of a harmless laboratory model yeast into the limited medical armory available to combat its evolutionary cousin, a major human pathogen. She is also a freelance scientific editor.